Lightweight Linux is a blog about using Linux on old computers. Lightweight distributions and applications bring your old hardware back to life!

FreeDOS - back to the eighties!

My first PC in the late 80's was a portable Amstrad with 640 KB RAM, two floppy drives and no hard drive at all. The whole operating system, a version of Microsoft DOS, and my favourite word processor Word Perfect were loaded from a 1.4 MB floppy. Younger readers can get a glimpse of computing in this era by using FreeDOS, a free clone of the Microsoft operating system.

You can find in Internet many sites for DOS software. For example, here a collection of more than 1000 freeware (free as in beer, not as in free speach) programs for MSDOS. Garbo PC archives were and still are an important collection of DOS software. Dosgames offers you more than 500 games.

I would not choose FreeDOS for everyday computing - word processing, spreadsheets, surfing on the web. It might be a good choice for learning to code in Assembler, C or Pascal. Retrogames should be the killer application of FreeDOS...